Richard Carrier wrote:This book is the second of two volumes examining a daring question: whether there is a case to be made that Jesus never really existed as a historical person. The alternative is that the Jesus we know originated as a mythical character, in tales symbolically narrating the salvific acts of a divine being who never walked the earth (and probably never existed at all). Later, this myth was mistaken for history (or deliberately repackaged that way), and then embellished over time. Though I shall argue it’s likely this alternative is true and that Jesus did not in fact exist, I cannot assume it has been conclusively proved here. In fact, it may yet be proved false in future work, using the very methods I employ (which were proposed and defended in my previous volume, Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus). Hence the point of this book is not to end the debate but to demonstrate that scholars need to take this hypothesis more seriously before dismissing it out of hand, and that they need much better arguments against it than they’ve heretofore deployed. A better refutation is needed, and a better theory of historicity, which, actually, credibly explains all the oddities in the evidence. If this book inspires nothing else, I’ll be happy if it’s that. But this book may do more. It might inspire more experts to agree with the possibility at least that Jesus Christ was born in myth, not history. And their continuing examination of the case may yet result in a growing consensus against the grain of current assumptions. Either outcome would satisfy me. For my biases are such as to make no difference what the result should be. I only want the truth to be settled. Nevertheless, all historians have biases, and only sound methods will prevent those from too greatly affecting our essential results. No progress in historical knowledge, in fact no historical knowledge at all, would be possible without such methods. Hence my previous volume developed a formal historical method for approaching this (or any other) debate, which will produce as objectively credible a conclusion as any honest historian can reach. One need merely plug all the evidence into that method to get a result. However, because this volume can’t address every single item of evidence (it merely addresses the best evidence there is), its conclusion may yet be brought down, even with its own method, simply by introducing something it omits. If so, I welcome it.

Carrier, Richard (2014-06-30). On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Kindle Locations 153-180). Sheffield Phoenix Press. Kindle Edition.